Justified season premiere recap: 'Fate's Right Hand'

January 21, 2015 4:22 AM

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The fifth season of Justified was surprisingly inconsistent, an issue with storytelling that the show had never really dealt with before. There were so many storylines to focus on from one episode to the next that the larger arc of the season, and of the show more generally, often got lost in the mix. But with the season finale, the show once again found its composure by returning to the only storyline that has really mattered after all of these years: the tension and inevitable showdown between Boyd and Raylan, and the wavering loyalty of Ava to Boyd coupled with her need to survive on her own. The final scene of last season's finale, where Ava agrees to become a criminal informant for Raylan, to relay any and all information about Boyd to Raylan in order to keep herself out of prison, puts us right back where we started. Boyd, Raylan, and Ava have been intertwined since the very first episode of this series, and by returning the focus to those characters at the end of season 5, it served as the perfect prologue to the series' final 13-episode run.

The final season premiere, "Fate's Right Hand," takes the first steps toward building to that inevitable confrontation between Boyd and Raylan, and in typical Justified fashion, it's not immediately clear how everything will go down; but the general sense of foreboding means that we have 12 more epi...